The Shadow Can Only Mock, It Cannot Make

There's a scene in J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King in which Frodo and Samwise are reunited after Frodo's capture by the villainous Orcs. Upon freeing Frodo, Sam speculates about the nature of the twisted, malign creatures, and Frodo answers: The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. So it is with the climate change denial industry, which attempted a rollout of a shiny new product, a young counterpart to teenaged climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Washington Post buried the lede in its initial coverage of the 'Anti-Greta':

Meet the anti-Greta, a young YouTuber campaigning against "climate alarmism" https://t.co/R03zXGx6jr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 24, 2020

Besides the fact that this kid is backed by fossil fuel interests, it also turns out that she is a white nationalist. Anti-immigrant? Antisemitic? Yep, she's the complete package, wrapping up all sorts of loathsome right-wing lunacy in a baby-faced package. The fact that she's German is just the final joke in a bad farce. Meanwhile, oil industry creeps in Alberta have been circulating sexualized cartoons of Greta Thunberg while their young industry spokesmodel crashes and burns almost as soon as she took the stage.

The Shadow can only mock, it cannot make... Greta Thunberg is a genuine activist, inspired by a righteous anger that her generation is being robbed of its birthright by a tiny minority of obscenely wealthy profiteers. The shadowy petrochemical industry groups attempted to come up with a counter to Greta, and they rolled out a twisted simulacrum... it's time to send this little neo-Nazi back to Mordor.

MAGAvirus

It's funny when you see your thoughts echoed perfectly in the posts of others, but Doktor Zoom and Scott Lemieux perfectly echoed my sentiments regarding Mike Pence's appointment as Coronavirus Czar... this is a guy who allowed an HIV epidemic to hit rural Indiana on his watch. While there is no stigma attached to COVID 19 like there is to HIV, the fact remains that an anti-science bigot is going to be heading up the anti-pandemic efforts when we need for someone to be serious for a second.

The sad, sick fact of our current dilemma is that, amid other CDC budget cuts, Trump disbanded the US Pandemic Response Team in 2018, ostensibly as a cost-cutting measure, though Trump's self-dealing golf cart rentals have cost taxpayers over a half-million dollars. The CDC response to the outbreak is incoherent at best.

The creepiest thing about this potential calamity is that Trump has long been skeptical about vaccines. An anti-science fanatic who has gutted the non-partisan governmental agencies which respond to emergencies is the last person we need to respond to a medical crisis such as we're facing.

Gave up Lent for Lent

A while ago, I wrote a post about how authoritarian Christians decided to adopt a 'no Fat Tuesday, all Ash Wednesday' brand of Christianity. Even more worrisome, they adopted a bizarro form of Christianity entirely devoid of Christ... the gentle Nazarene was thrown over in favor of his smitey Old Testament dad. I used to be a fairly devout Catholic, but the sexual abuse scandals combined with a conservative orthodoxy which made friends of mine into second class citizens shunned by their families, made me decide to give up religion for Lent.

I actually used to observe what for me was the ultimate Lenten discipline... I would go coffee free for the forty-day season. Being a caf-fiend, this was quite a sacrifice, though it would end up with me 'resetting' my coffee addiction, returning to coffee the punch it should have. Now, I couldn't even be bothered, it's not like I live a profligate lifestyle, why give up an inexpensive luxury, even as an exercise in secular self-discipline?

I actually continued my Mardi Gras celebration into Ash Wednesday, meeting with friends at a Mexican restaurant not far from my workplace for a nice pre-work dinner. Who needs fasting and abstinence when one could have a nice, somewhat luxe dinner with close friends? Giving up Lent for Lent was a gradual thing for me, the cultural associations with not eating meat on Fridays used to be a point of pride, a mark of solidarity to a community. I'm a member of other communities, though, most of which haven't forced me to choose sides in a culture war that I would never have chosen.

When the World Seems Like It's Going to Hell, Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler!

Sure, the world is going to hell, with the COVID 19 outbreak seeming to approach pandemic status, violence breaking out in India during Trump's visit, and the stock market tanking, but it's also Mardi Gras, so I'm taking a breather to go eat a po'boy before going out drinking. Carnival may have been cancelled, but the good times must roll ever onward.

A few years back, I wrote a post about that song most associated with 'Mardi Gras', Iko Iko. Back in the 1960s, three teenaged relatives (two sisters and a cousin) had a hit with the song:





I found a performance by the group, now mature women, which demonstrates that they still maintained that sass and charm they had as schoolgirls:





I'm glad I wasn't drinking a Sazerac when Rose said she was 'moving her motor to the beat of the music'. Anyway, the world won't be getting any better or much worse within the next twenty-four hours, so might as well enjoy Fat Tuesday. There's always Ash Wednesday for reflecting on the current Badness.

A Remarkable Trajectory

After yesterday's triumphant post about science, here's some sad news, Katherine Johnson, the NASA computer whose mathematics skills were crucial to the success of the United States' manned spaceflight projects, has died at the age of 101:

We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers: https://t.co/Tl3tsHAfYB pic.twitter.com/dGiGmEVvAW

— NASA (@NASA) February 24, 2020

Largely ignored for the contributions that allowed white men like Alan Shepard and John Glenn to (rightfully) be lauded as heroes, Katherine Johnson, an African-American woman, finally received the adulation she and her colleagues deserved, being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and ending up as one of the subjects of Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures (the basis of the eponymous movie). That's a little late for someone whose mathematical work in the 1960s allowed the Apollo lunar modules to synch up with the orbital command modules to safely bring our Moon Men back to Earth.

I feel obligated to point out that sexism and racism ruin everything, and that Civil Rights are crucial to allowing humans to reach their potential. Katherine Johnson was able to succeed in a thirty-three year career with NASA despite the racism and sexism of American society, but it wasn't enough to make her a household name. Things have improved since the not-so-good old days, and NASA created a lovely tribute to her:





While I often rail against the short-term silliness of humanity, I believe in the long-term success of our species... provided we get over our bigotries and our greed. Sure, it looks as if the lunatics have taken over the asylum, but there are enough dedicated, brilliant people, such as Katherine Johnson, to maintain my faith in us.

Meanwhile, Real Science Proceeds Apace

Yesterday's post was about a self-taught 'engineer' conducting an experiment in an attempt to prove a pseudoscientific thesis... it was nice to see him using empiricism in his quest for knowledge, though his efforts... uhhhh... fell flat. Today, I am more interested in real science- the CERN crew has been able to create and maintain antimatter for up to twenty-four hours.

One of the mysteries of the universe is the prevalence of matter- if the Big Bang had produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, the opposite-charged particles would have annihilated each other, resulting in No Universe At All. A small asymmetry at the beginning would have resulted in the current mass (heh heh) asymmetry. It's all very heady stuff, but suffice it to say that real discoveries are being made, and nobody has to plaster themselves onto the desert floor to make them.

Antimatter has come up in a few of the Secret Science Club lectures I have recapped. I imagine it will become a more common subject as physicists better learn how to create and maintain the stuff, even if it really wouldn't be so good for power generation.

The Flight of Stupid Icarus

There are those of us who fly to Empyrean heights while others trudge through the mud and muck. The peril, though, is that these heroes can fly too close to the Sun, which is small, close to the Earth, and trapped within the dome of the firmament. Such a hero was Stupid Icarus, aka 'Mad' Mike Hughes, who died as he lived, launching himself into the wild blue yonder in a steam-powered homemade rocket in another attempt to prove that the Earth is flat:





It seems as if his grasp of aeronautical/astronautical engineering was a sound as his grasp of astronomy and geology. Protip: steampunk is a genre of fiction.

There's something to be said, though, about dying in the pursuit of one's passions... it beats, say, dying of starvation in the gutter. Sure, he didn't contribute anything to the sum total of human knowledge (besides a cautionary tale to wannabe daredevils), but the world needs its Quixotes.

This one's for Mad Mike:





Just, like, pretend the song is stupid...